Use of measured accelerations from a passenger rail car to evaluate ride quality and track roughness – A case study

Increasing traffic and speeds on passenger rail lines, and a short season for maintenance work, have motivated the industry to find new methods to assess the condition of existing infrastructure and determine where upgrades are required. In this study, acceleration data from the car body and axle boxes of a revenue car over 92 km of a Canadian passenger rail route in Ontario were collected for two purposes: first, to apply weighted filtering method according to ISO 2631-1997 standard as a technique to determine the locations which highly impact the ride quality and to investigate the effect of type of track features and speed on the ride quality; second, a new analytical method called the envelope of acceleration was applied to use the recorded accelerations to evaluate the alignment and surface roughness along the track. Since the alignment and surface roughness values are always positive and are calculated over a specified length (e.g. 9.5 m, 18.9 m, 38 m) an envelope technique was employed which uses spline interpolations over local maxima of the absolute magnitude of accelerations at every separated n samples corresponding to best fit with track roughness. The regression analysis between the envelope of accelerations and alignment and surface roughness presented a meaningful correlation and showed the applied method is a promising analytical technique to indicate rough sections of the track. The limitations to the application of envelope of acceleration are also discussed.